Guild Wars 2

Daecollo.9578:

Shadow Protector, Not effected by boon duration, and if you already have regeneration active, it doesn’t even grant more, no other trait in the game is like this, why Shadow Protector?

Shadow Protector’s Regeneration should go off every time you stealth, and should also be affected by boon duration/regeneration duration.

Bountiful Theft, Not effected by boon duration, its 15 seconds of vigor regardless, it used to be 30 seconds but got nerfed to oblivion.

Vigorous Recovery, Not effected by boon duration, its 10 seconds of vigor regardless.

With 20 in Acro, I get 17 seconds of Vigor from Bountiful Theft. I did not see an increase on Shadow Protector or Thrill of the Crime, but the duration does add a second longer to the Swiftness and and about 2 seconds Power of Inertia. Also, the only time I’ve see Shadow Protector stack with another regen is when combined with Hide in Shadows, you will end up with 9 1/4 seconds of stealth (20% boon increase), but that’s it (in my experience).

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Silent Killer Ruven.1986:

Hard to believe no one said this yet but, necro well spells deny a thief stealth as well.

That surely comes under AoE.

Not every aoe denies a thief stealth though, I get the revealed debuff when I walk through a necro Well spell.

Just throwing this out there but:

I would love it if the Steal Recharge on Trickery Traitline was replaced and worked like Expertise for rangers on GW1. Say every 1 point in Trickery reduced Initiative cost by 1% on all of our skills. Before people go getting all worked up, the typical backstab thief either doesn’t go into this tree at all, and if they do, its not very far. So I don’t wanna see a dozen replies of “omg 30% ini cost on all backstab thieves”, because splitting their traits so far just to reach that would severely hamper their damage to begin with… but I do think it would be a nice boost to condi thieves, which rely more on initiative to output/sustain damage, and already go 20-30 points in the tree. Thoughts?

Aegael.6938:

Thanks for clearly not reading the entire thing before responding. I never made any mention of changing thief skills to a cooldown system.

You also have the opposite. Thief is the class that can spam the 5 skill the MOST out of any other class. Even if you swap weapons, that skill is typically on a 25+ second cooldown, much longer than a single weapon swap. For a thief, he just needs to wait a few seconds for 5-6 initiative, then he can use his skill again.

I’m ticking this in the category of “Senseless kneejerk reaction.”

That’s kind of where you’re wrong, when another class swaps weapons, sure they have all their skills off CD. If a thief swaps weapons at 0 initiative tho, he doesn’t have all of his skills available for “spamming”, he has to wait for that initiative to regen. And he needs to wait a bit longer than “a few seconds” for 6 initiative, it regens 1 point every 1.67 seconds. That’s effectively giving a 10 second CD to EVERY 6 initiative skill once a thief burns their initiative.

Any other class can burn all the CDs on a weapon and switch w/o giving it a second thought, having access to 5 new skills, not saying anyone does that(also not saying nobody does that, because some people obviously do), but the thief doesn’t have that luxury. They have to manage their initiative.

Hard to believe no one said this yet but, necro well spells deny a thief stealth as well.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Fellknight.4820:

Lysico.4906:

Mesmer, dodge once then drop your 2x clones which also stealths you.

Shatter when he pops and off you go..

They are easy to kill

Mirror Image does not stealth you, it just creates two clones, Decoy creates one clone and stealths you.

And a thief can use CnD every 6 seconds to restealth

Blinding powder to grant them blindness miss the shatter and re-stealth

Shadow Refuge to sit in stealth for 10 seconds

Hide in Shadows to remove all conditions grant regen and stealth

All of these abilities will make the clones stop in there tracks and just stand there.

Name one other MMO that a stealth class can teleport on to you while stealthing themselves and deal a player 50-75% of there total lifepool and re-stealth every 6 seconds. I’ll wait…

Perfect world international…..and it sucks. It sucks really bad.

whoa whoa whoa, he said 50-75% hp, PWI sins just one shot you from stealth. I remember watching a sin with +12 Nirvana daggers 1 shot a sage barb in tiger form with 43k hp, double sparked headhunt zerk crit from stealth ftw?

Elloni.2473:

Issues with the thief class

- perma evade underwater this I can actually agree with, I hate even using that skill, it’s only good in pvp for stalling people. No one in their right mind is going to die to this skill tho, if they do…that’s another issue entirely
- the restealth debuff neededs to be longer (+2 more seconds) I’d like a bit of compensation for this one if it were implemented, but don’t get your hopes up
- Heartseeker covers too much ground is only really an issue with glass cannon thieves, the gap closing effect on this skill doesn’t benefit my condi thief nearly as much
- Heartseeker should do less damage after multiple uses would rather see this skill require some build-up to do its damage, instead of being so rewarding to spam it on a person in low hp
- The damage on steal is too high problem isn’t steal, it’s the powerful 10 point trait
- Auto attack damage is too high on dagger and shortbow (why does a thief do more damage than a ranger with a shortbow if they are both specced for damage?) because the thief shortbow auto attack doesn’t fire at twice the rate and also apply an impressive bleed, I’d switch you auto atks in a heartbeat
- Quickness should be removed from the thief class No, quickness should be removed from all classes or reworked, again more bias against thieves?

• Stomp unstealth the thief* Thief isn’t the only one who can stealth stomp, so why just thief? Very biased, also stealth=/= invincible, the thief has to stay there the entire animation. This is a group game, not a solo game, your team members can pound the living kitten out of the air around you and probably kill the thief

First things first, I play a condi thief(not that it matters, but w/e). Not here to address all the thief issues at hand, and some of these ideas may have been mentioned already but here goes:

Mug: Could be toned down a tad, maybe 5-10% or bumped to a 20 or 30 point trait. I played a backstab thief for a few days and absolutely couldn’t resist it for being only a 10 point trait. Or perhaps tone the damage down 30%+ and just make this effect passive on steal(rename steal into mug? idk) and replace it with a new Major Trait. (just a thought)

Hidden Killer: Pretty underwhelming for just about everything but Backstab, but in my experience the only people who pick this trait up already have high crit chance(ie glass cannon backstab). How about moving this trait to the 20 or 30 point Shadow Arts slot, forcing anyone who wants to use it for backstab to spread their traits and making sacrifices. Would also give backstab a place to the people who don’t stack a ton of crit, and it seems like it would be more at home in the Shadow Arts tree, given the nature of the trait.

Time for a bit of compare/contrast: Something I would like to point out is a raw dmg thief does, for the most part, some decent dmg with their auto atks alone, hear me out. Since the dancing dagger nerf(I have an idea for this later in the post) most of your initiative is fueling CnD—->Backstabs or Heartseeker spams, these are obviously boosts to your damage. However, a condi thief does pitiful auto atk damage, and is forced to drain loads of initiative to output any dmg at all(D/D perspective, not P/D). In before the apples/oranges comments, but rangers can stack a pretty impressive, albiet short duration, bleed on their shortbow auto atk, just an observation.

With that in mind, I had some ideas for condi thieves:

Dancing Dagger: How about it applies a short 3-5s stack or two of bleed? Since the damage on here is subpar at best now, how bout making it useful to condi thieves apart from the short cripple in pvp? (since using all the initiative of a DD cuts our bleed applications). Perhaps drop the initiative cost by 1?

Bleeds, the thief has the ability to burst a good number of stacks of it on an opponent, but at the cost of a utility(caltrops, if you use it, I do not in most cases), the majority of your initiative, or even your dodge energy(Uncatchable trait).

Since conditions are so easily removed(some classes can do it easier than others, I know), how about a trait that either increases bleed duration a bit, ooooor a chance to apply bleeds on crit. Most condi thieves I talk to use Carrion(4% base crit), I mix Rabid/Carrion for survivability(23% crit because of it), so the trait wouldn’t be too overpowered.

I also wouldn’t be against lowering the cost of Death Blossom by 1 ini, or maybe having it apply 1 more stack of bleed per use. I am open to any suggestions(constructive ones, not flaming).

And this last idea I brought up before, I would love to see something done with this. I recently tried using a venomshare build in fotm, and I was very unsatisfied with it. I wasn’t too upset about the short range(telling ppl in mumble to stack for venoms) for a grandmaster trait, but mainly about turning myself into a gimmick. You have to trade so much utility for such minor effects, so I have a suggestion:

Teerwik.1650

F2-F6 should just be our non elite venom abilities. They aren’t worth the utility slot, and steal really isn’t all that on par with class based abilities like Shatter/DS, thats just my personal opinion

Silent Killer Ruven.1986

I definitely love Teerwik’s idea, maybe give them a global cooldown similar to elementalist attunements when you use one, reduced by points in the Trickery Trait line maybe. I love some of venom utilities, but as they are right now I don’t love them enough to spend a utility on them.

Edit: Going beyond f4 would seem a tad cumbersome tho, so maybe combine/refine the venoms. Say make Spider only apply to 3 hits and also apply a single stack of bleed per hit, making it the DoT venom. Combine Ice Drake and Skale into a the “debilitating” Venom. Change Devourer to a 2 second immobilize on 1 hit, and a short duration cripple on the 2nd hit, to make it a movement impairing one. Give each one something like a 30 second CD, and activate a 15 second shared CD when one is used and drop their duration to about 10 seconds so they can’t be stacked. The Venom traits could use a look at too, but this could open up new strategies.

(edited about 20 hours ago by Silent Killer Ruven.1986)

Feel free to share your ideas or build upon these, I would love some feedback.

DiogoSilva.7089:

More freedom usually means more extreme builds and less diversity, because people would pick the single best combinations, and we would get a meta of extreme bursts and extreme bunkers, as if our current meta wasn’t already shallow enough. We need restriction. But maybe, yeah, a few more amulets to pick wouldn’t be a bad thing, as long as they were properly balanced.

Are you saying I deserve to be shut out for wanting balanced stats? That I need to just shut up and roll a glass cannon/bunker to perpetuate the issue destroying spvp. The cornerstone of gw2 is to be unique, different than everyone else, why should we be so restricted? We have access to all these stats in the standard area of the game(the majority) and its not breaking anything without glitches. Infact, I refuse to group with glass cannons when I run anything, like Arah. Even though they hit hard, they spend most of the run on the ground crying out for a res.

Dorregaray.7126:

Imagine bunker guardian with +toughness + vitality +healing power.
Or necromancer +power +toughness +condition damage.

Enough said.

Except those stats do not exist on a set, plz re read, I never mentioned adding new stats, just allowing us freedom to choose the existing ones.

Nhemin.1520:

Overall there needs to be a little bit more diversity in the game. I feel right now that the game is too “shotgun” in pvp. Its either you build your character to be a really, really squishy glass cannon that takes someone down in 2 shots or a impossible to kill tank (mainly guardian does this).

I feel that having the rest of the accessory/ring slots unlocked would allow people to specialize even further or even balance themselves out more. I know when I play thief that I tend to want to not be so squishy, that I want to make up for my high crit/damage with some vitality/toughness.

Likewise on my guardian I’d like to make up for my lack of offense in some gear as I’m mostly rolling tank/support in PvP to help cap and hold points.

I know most people will cry and say “now thief/mes/ele will only do MORE dmg”, but I disagree. I believe giving people more options allows for the rest of us to balance out our builds. It also lets people do more interesting builds as well that you don’t see much.

Well in pve w/o buffs, my thief has 2952 atk, 42% crit w/ 57% bonus crit dmg, 2811 armor and 14955 HP. Everyone I ask calls me crazy for going with balance, it’s like the majority of the community can’t fathom playing something other than a glass cannon or a bunker. The ones who do try to balance their stats in spvp don’t have the option because the gear isn’t available. Yes, I know people will say that it allows glass cannons to do more damage, but it also allows you the flexibility to have more defense and a broader range of stats instead of being ‘pigeonholed’ (as some people put it) into one of those amulets.

(/rage)Also, am I the only one that wishes they would change the pvp knights Vitality back to toughness? Knight’s is a great way to give yourself armor without having to give up too much offense, but if you use it in spvp, you’re leaving yourself with base toughness unless you use a crappy jewel for 125(which doesn’t help much with all the glass cannons running around) (/end rage)

I know this isn’t gw1 anymore, but for those who didn’t play, when you made a PvP character, all your armor had max stats(similar to your armor in the mists). Instead of an amulet you got your armor’s stats by applying an insignia to each piece, so I guess what I’m suggesting is to make each piece of gear, ammy, ring, and earring blank, and allow us to attach an “insignia of the knight” etc to each individual piece. Let us put the standard exquisite gems on our trinkets, for those of us who would like to fine tune our stats, and it wouldn’t be unbalanced because everyone would have the choice to do so, but it would add some depth to your stats instead of everyone running around with the same couple amulets…

evilapprentice.6379:

I did not participate in beta much – were there more options for rounding out your character? Because at the moment, the celestial amulet is garbage, and I hate not being able to run a balanced spec.

In the beta we had access to everything but the back slot item, but too many people complained it took too much work(or something) and it was condensed.

edit: I’ll be in class, so I won’t be able to respond til about 4 hours from now

I know people in the beta complained it was too cumbersome to set up their trinkets, but I’d like to be able to customize my gear similar to the way I can outside spvp. The current status doesn’t give you much freedom as far as choosing your stats, nor balance to help adjust your weaknesses. Love to hear other people’s constructive thoughts on this please, not the people complaining because it would take more than 5 seconds to pick an amulet.

Was told to bring this idea to this thread, would add some more depth to thief gameplay. I hope you enjoy

Teerwik.1650

F2-F6 should just be our non elite venom abilities. They aren’t worth the utility slot, and steal really isn’t all that on par with class based abilities like Shatter/DS, thats just my personal opinion

Silent Killer Ruven.1986

I definitely love Teerwik’s idea, maybe give them a global cooldown similar to elementalist attunements when you use one, reduced by points in the Trickery Trait line maybe. I love some of venom utilities, but as they are right now I don’t love them enough to spend a utility on them.

Edit: Going beyond f4 would seem a tad cumbersome tho, so maybe combine/refine the venoms. Say make Spider only apply to 3 hits and also apply a single stack of bleed per hit, making it the DoT venom. Combine Ice Drake and Skale into a the “debilitating” Venom. Change Devourer to a 2 second immobilize on 1 hit, and a short duration cripple on the 2nd hit, to make it a movement impairing one. Give each one something like a 30 second CD, and activate a 15 second shared CD when one is used and drop their duration to about 10 seconds so they can’t be stacked. The Venom traits could use a look at too, but this could open up new strategies.

(edited about 20 hours ago by Silent Killer Ruven.1986)

I definitely love Teerwik’s idea, maybe give them a global cooldown similar to elementalist attunements when you use one, reduced by points in the Trickery Trait line maybe. I love some of venom utilities, but as they are right now I don’t love them enough to spend a utility on them.

Edit: Going beyond f4 would seem a tad cumbersome tho, so maybe combine/refine the venoms. Say make Spider only apply to 3 hits and also apply a single stack of bleed per hit, making it the DoT venom. Combine Ice Drake and Skale into a the “debilitating” Venom. Change Devourer to a 2 second immobilize on 1 hit, and a short duration cripple on the 2nd hit, to make it a movement impairing one. Give each one something like a 30 second CD, and activate a 15 second shared CD when one is used and drop their duration to about 10 seconds so they can’t be stacked. The Venom traits could use a look at too, but this could open up new strategies.